Our Town Could Be Your Life

It is to my everlasting shame as a writer dedicated to seeking out
new, unheralded local music to love and champion that I first caught
wind of the Portland-based band What’s Up? by reading Pitchfork. The
details are particularly humiliating. Not only was I scooped by the
national press on a band from my own town but to add insult to injury,
it was in the context of an interview with English electro-pop notable
Max Tundra, who cited What’s Up? in response to the prompt “One obscure
band you think should be more popular?” How on earth did a fancy-pants
European indie celebrity know of a house show-playing Portland band
that I myself had never even heard of? How demeaning.

And it gets worse. Intrigued by what I heard on What’s Up?’s
MySpace, I resolved to see them play live. Due to some intractable
scheduling issues, it was only in Austin, Texas, at South by Southwest
that I finally managed to catch them—and they were being featured
in a showcase by the prestigious German label Tomlab. Again, as both a
localist and early adopter, I’d been bested by continental music
know-it-alls. I would be tempted to save my pride and simply keep this
mortifying matter to myself, never to speak of What’s Up? and their
undeniably impressive live show again, save for one detail: What’s Up?
are the most exciting new band I’ve heard this year.

Of all the sub-genres that dominated independent music in the ’90s,
rhythmically complex instrumental rock music—whether you want to
call it post-rock, math-rock, or anything else—is one of the few
that has not seen a significant revival in recent years. Bands like
Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky that continue to truck in the
melodramatic bombast of ’90s post-rock largely seem like relics, and
groups that have managed to explore new territory in instrumental music
with standard rock instrumentation, such as Hella, have done so by
going down the modernist rabbit hole of technical virtuosity at the
expense of intelligible emotional content. But, as it turns out, there
is a third and infinitely more satisfying way: the way of What’s
Up?

Consisting of a nimble power trio (excepting moments in which guitar
is abandoned for keyboard, or the drummer plays a synth with his left
hand while holding down a mixed-meter groove with his right, something
that ought to give you some sense of the band’s technical acumen),
What’s Up? have embraced the cerebral elements of the ’90s instrumental
indie rock legacy worth preserving while foregoing the lust for volume
and scale that backed the genre into a corner. The result is something
unique in the recent history of sophisticated instrumental rock music:
joyous indie-prog whose makers intuitively understand the technical
prowess invoked by the phrase “in the pocket,” and can mete it out in
doses under four minutes.

Why, then, have so few Portlanders heard of What’s Up? in comparison
to the international indie cognoscenti at large? The answer is that the
band hasn’t been here very long, but they’re not exactly new to music,
either. Multi-instrumentalist songwriter Robby Moncrieff—a
fixture in the Sacramento music community, who has played with the
Advantage, Marnie Stern, and Who’s Your Favorite Son God—came up
to Portland last July with the intention of staying a few days. The
sojourn turned into a longer visit when his friends in Dirty Projectors
enlisted his help to record their forthcoming album Bitte Orca,
which they were working on in Portland at the time. Moncrieff took to
Portland, decided to move, and lucky for us, his What’s Up? bandmates
joined him. Hopefully they’re here to stay.

What’s Up? play a free, all-ages show at Backspace on Thursday,
April 2.